


the only one i know

by redandgold



Category: Men's Football RPF
Genre: Bartender AU, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-27
Updated: 2017-06-27
Packaged: 2018-11-19 15:59:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11316762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/redandgold/pseuds/redandgold
Summary: An international football superstar walks into a bar.





	the only one i know

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Anemoi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Anemoi/gifts).



> Thanks to [Sharon](archiveofourown.org/users/Anemoi/pseuds/Anemoi) for holding my hand always in all things Beville. <3 
> 
> June prompt:
> 
>   
>  _“The lights go out,_   
>  _it’s just the three of us,_   
>  _you and me, and all the stuff_   
>  _we’re so scared of.”_
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> Bruce Springsteen, Tunnel of Love

Neither of them say anything. David doesn't give his name and Gary doesn't ask for it; he pours David a whiskey and goes back to polishing the countertop, eyes flicking occasionally to the telly in the far corner of the bar every so often.

It's a charade. He understands. Even famous people want to be anonymous, and maybe a dank pub some ways from Canal Street works out best. Sometimes David looks up and stares hard at him like he's trying to make up his mind but then averts his gaze. Gary begins to mute the telly when he comes. It's easier, and that.

When David leaves, Gary collects his glass and thumbs his finger over it, once, polishes that too.

 

*

 

David tells him about Vic and the kids sometimes. It's never anything of consequence - Vic went shopping yesterday, it was the little one's birthday last week, we had brunch at that little cafe in Arndale. What, Gary says jokingly, not here? and David gives him a smile.

That's a first. Gary's not seen David smile before, not unless you counted those carefully calculated interviews where he's trained his cheek muscles to perfection and his teeth are buffed until they gleam. This one appears like a sparrow startled into flight. Almost as if he isn't even aware of it until it happens, and then he's embarrassed and buries it in his drink.

Gary likes it, he thinks. He puts it carefully in the back of his mind, a compartment labelled _Sunshine Blonde_ next to all of the other ones - _nice smile_. David doesn't have a name yet. For all Gary knows he's not even David Beckham, footballer extraordinaire, the man Gary could have been if he'd just been a little bit better. And until he knows that he isn't going to pinch himself.

But he likes it, he thinks, and he hates that.

 

*

 

"I don't know what I'm waiting for," David says one day, all of a sudden. Gary looks up from where he's wiping the counter.

"If it's a free pint, it's going to be a long wait."

"'Please, sir, can I have some more?'" David pulls a face. "No. Not that. But I am waiting for something."

"Something to happen."

"Yeah."

Gary drops his voice. "In five seconds robots are going to burst through that door and you're the last line of humanity's defence."

"Shut up, you twat." David's laughing and Gary blinks owlishly, like he's trying to figure something out. Just doesn't quite know what it is. "I don't know. Sometimes I wonder what it'd be like to not be me. To just - run away, get a bike, drive across half of the country. Keep a tattered journal. Skydive. Climb a mountain. Fall madly in love again."

He fixes Gary with his gaze, cool and hazel. "Y'know what I mean?"

Gary swallows. "A little," he says.

 

*

 

He reads interviews and the like sometimes. They're all over, anyway - pick up any issue of GQ or People or whatever else it was and there would be David, smiling up at him. He buys them and puts them in a drawer below the counter without knowing why.

 _What do the tattoos mean to you?_ _  
_ _The tattoos are a way of me expressing deeper feelings, about the things I care about and love._

If Phil ever looks over and sees what he's reading, he doesn't mention it. Gary parks himself on the steps out back and rubs his bloodbitten pub worker fingers over the glossy paper, feeling miles away.

_I’ve got amazing kids, and an amazing wife, amazing parents. We’ve always protected our children._

Gary squeezes his eyes shut and thinks until he doesn't know what he's thinking about anymore. Whether there are gay footballers. Whether you can fall in love with someone you barely know. Whether fairy tales really do exist outside of all those rom-coms Phil always drags him to watch.

Mostly they ask about personal things - which is strange, considering he's got the best right foot in the league, and Gary knows every single one of his free kicks by heart - but maybe he's just that sort.

Gary does find one, though. It's older, and he comes across as slightly shy, the twenty year old with the floppy blonde hair that Gary first remembers seeing in a League Cup win over Port Vale. (They're the same age. It makes him wonder.)

_I couldn’t have hit it any better. I remember it started so far out to the left and came back in. It sorta bent round. There was nothing lucky about it. I’d hit that shot for goals a bunch of times as a youth._

Of course he knows that goal. Everyone does. The sunniest of afternoons, the same blonde boy in the centre with his arms raised above his head. Chin stuck out in a fierce joy and pride, not just for having scored that goal, but having scored it for United.

Flash Cockney. Hometown hero.

Gary puts that interview with the rest. He closes his eyes and allows himself to think of another world, one where David has got his arm around his shoulder and he's laughing and they're both laughing and someone asks Gary when he knew. And Gary would tell them all about the goal everyone had seen anyway, but tell them like it was in technicolour, like watching a rainbow that would never end.

 

*

 

The football's on, but David isn't on the pitch. David is in the pub. Gary raises an eyebrow but doesn't say anything; just goes on wiping the counter and looking up at the telly every now and then, clenching his fist every time United go close. There's a bare patch growing and it happens to be exactly in front of where David sits.

Not that it means anything.

"You, uh."

David's looking at him. Gary's looking at Solskjaer.

"You watch the football?"

He feels like he ought to say something clever and funny, like _Stockport till I die_ , but all he can do is nod and feel his throat dry up like a desert. Solskjaer scores and he's running down the pitch and Gary can almost run with him, if he tried.

David watches him for almost the whole match. United beat Sunderland 3-1, then he slaps a fifty pound note on the counter and leaves.

 

*

 

He doesn't turn up for a week. Gary's just starting to convince himself that it was nothing more than a hallucination. Even goes to look it up in the dictionary: _hallucination. noun._ _an experience involving the apparent perception of something not present. "I saw David Beckham hanging around in my pub for months."_

He asks Scholesy if he thinks people on the telly can step out of it and buy a drink. Scholesy looks at him like he's drunk too many ciders (he might have touched one).

Maybe he shouldn't have mentioned the football thing. Gary Neville, non-football fan. It sounds weird even as he thinks it, and at any rate he wouldn't have been able to keep that lie up for long. Even if it meant keeping the captain of England in his pub.

But then. One day the captain of England walks back in, sits at the counter, palms his hand over the gloss of the bare patch that's faded a little. Gary comes over and puts the cloth down.

"Thought you'd been killed by robots."

"Nah." David flicks him a lazy grin, the kind Gary's seen in pictures and the like, except there isn't a camera. "Killed them all. Saved the world. Celebrating."

So Gary pours him his celebratory drink and David sips at it carefully, Gary noticing that he puts the glass back perfect in the middle of the water ring that's formed on the wood.

"Call me David," he says when he finishes.

"Call me Gaz," Gary says.

Cloth on counter. Hand on cloth. Door swings open. He bites his lip and wipes the water ring away.

 

*

 

The first time Gary fouled a boy was when he was eight. They were playing the Boundary Park Juniors and he'd slid in too late, caught the boy's ankle and sent him tumbling onto the grass. He'd picked himself up and kept running.

It'd been a crap game, that. Dad told him later that there'd been scouts and then stopped, not sure how to go on. Phil had been there too, and Gary had seen his face change ever so slightly, as if he'd known.

Two weeks later they told him he wasn't good enough. All right, he said, took off his Robson jersey, never wore it again.

 

*

 

The first time Gary kissed a boy was when he was fifteen. He doesn't remember the boy's name, only that he liked United.

They must have both been drunk (he can't think of any other explanation). They'd sat on the staircase after the game and the other boy had leaned into him and he hadn't resisted. Afterwards he walked into the toilet and stared into the mirror, tracing his lips with his gaze, the spots on his neck where the boy had held him burning like a strange kind of fire.

 

*

 

"It's my birthday soon," David says.

The sky outside is turning pink, the kind of April day you don't get all too often in Manchester without rain. Gary doesn't know what he's meant to say, so he offers a smile instead.

"You're getting nowt from me."

David snorts. "Would expect that of you, mate."

Gary looks back down at the bare patch. He needs to stop fucking scrubbing.

"I was thinking of having a party." David reaches over the bar to punch Gary in the shoulder gently. Gary flinches without meaning to and David withdraws, his eyes strangely pale and flat, like he's trying to say something but neither of them know what.

"Where?"

"Here."

 _Oh._ Gary pulls his lips into a line and draws his eyebrows together. David's watching him with an expression bordering on intensity.

"Just a lads' night kind of thing," he says. "I'll pay, of course."

Million pound man David Beckham. International superstar David Beckham. Of course he'll pay. Something about it feels dirty, dishonest, on both sides. Maybe, Gary thinks, he ought to say something: _you shouldn't have your party here. You shouldn't come here anymore. Why? I think I love you._  

"Scholesy isn't going to be happy about it," is what he says.

It makes David laugh. Gary laughs, too.

 

*

 

As it turns out, Scholesy isn't happy about it, but relents when Gary asks nicely (always does). Gary spends the rest of the week ordering bottles of Haig Club and panicking about delivery dates. It's good to have something to do, and it takes his mind off other things. Sitting around the bar having a game of chicken he's not even sure the other bloke is playing gets tiring after a while.

David comes by still, when training will allow for it. He doesn't drink all that often. "Sir Alex cracking down on it?" Gary says, teasing, and David rolls his eyes.

"I'm a professional footballer, Neville. I can't pollute the purity of my body."

"Fuck off," Gary grins, pours him another one.

David watches him. "What are you like when you're drunk?"

It's a weird question. Gary shrugs. "Scholesy says I slobber on everyone a lot."

"More than you already do?"

"I've not slobbered on you, have I?"

"It's gonna happen one day, I know it."

"Bollocks."

All he wants, really, is this: David across the bar from him, smiling (somehow better than any photoshoot he's ever done), glass in the middle of the circle of water, eyes never looking away even when Gary does.

 

*

 

United stroll to the league on David's birthday, which seems fitting somehow. Gary closes the pub for the day and he and Scholesy go to watch the game; four-one against Charlton, quick, clean goals and beautiful football. David scores the first goal, picks up van Nistelrooy's backwards header and dips it in. Gary screams as loudly as he does for the next three goals. No more and no less.

He catches Scholesy's head turned towards him, once, but even as he shifts Scholesy's looking back at the game, so it must have been a trick of the light.

Everyone gets up in the requisite hurry to the trams when the final whistle is blown but he grabs Scholesy's sleeve. "Stay a minute."

An empty stadium is the strangest kind of feeling. The seats are bare except for the two of them, rows and rows of red, and no more shirts adorn the pitch. All is quiet, how stadiums should never be.

"Gaz - " Scholesy says, but Gary shakes his head.

He doesn't remember the first time he came here. He supposed he must have been four, five - they'd be all the way across where the East Stand is now, him climbing up the railings, trying to get a look at Robson.

He doesn't know what makes heroes, or what makes him turn people into them. Maybe it's the same impulse that drives loves at first sight, pledging yourself without even knowing who they are. There was Robson. There was Cantona. And then a blonde boy dressed in red, walking out of the players' tunnel Gary is sat across now, hand curled into fist resting on his chest.

 

*

 

He's on three pints of cider and getting steadily worse, steadily being the ironic word. The bottle in his hand wobbles and David reaches out to hold his shoulder, laughing.

"All right there, Gaz?"

"Yeah," he mumbles. Someone asks for a mojito and he forgets the mint leaves but it's at the point of the evening where everyone's too pissed to care.

David's getting on with Phil, which is nice. They're talking about - Gary stops. He doesn't even know what they'd have to talk about. Phil cries when he sees the dead chickens in Tesco and David's favourite movie is _Die Hard_.

As long as they aren't talking about him, he thinks, which is in fairness just the cocky twat type of thing he hates.

It's getting past midnight. People are beginning to stagger out in their ones and twos, arms around each other in a way Gary stares at, burning. David's still here. He looks up and his eyes meet Gary's.

Neither of them say anything.

"Toilet break," Gary mumbles to Scholesy, pushes around him, stumbles towards the door to the back alley. He can't feel the tips of his fingers. There's a staircase - something about him and staircases, fucking hell - he falls into it, runs the palm of his hand against the cold steel.

David opens the door three seconds later. Gary tries to smile.

"Long night."

"Uh-huh."

It's a stupid game they play. A stupid game that doesn't mean anything. Let's pretend you're not David Beckham. Let's pretend you're just another paying customer. Let's pretend I don't -

"I don't know what to do," David says.

Gary laughs. It isn't supposed to come out short or bitter but he wasn't supposed to fall in love with a married fucking superstar either and that's just how it rolls, isn't it.

"Ask someone else, mate. I run a fucking pub."

(David isn't the person he hates here, he realises. Not _don't drag me into your shit_ but _I run a pub_. He curls his fingers and watches them dissolve in the air.)

"No, I - " Even in the dark Gary can see David flushing. "This isn't about any of that."

"What is it about?"

"I don't," David starts, pauses, tries again. "I don't get why I can be in a room full of people I love and yet I'm stood outside here talking to you."

Gary's shoulders scrunch up and he makes a noise he isn't sure he meant to make. David's watching him intently, the same way Gary has seen his eyes narrow when he points to two bottles on the top shelf behind the bar and says _those aren't straight_.

Everything is calculated, Gary realises. Everything designed to appeal; the latest hairstyle, the latest underwear ad, the of course I want to stays. He can't be the first person who's fallen in love with David Beckham, for no reason at all. David is built for people to love.

He doesn't know what he's built for. United, maybe. Red and blood and dark European nights. He wishes his edges could fold in on themselves, until that wasn't all he was, until another kind of heart was allowed.

David sits down next to him, careful not to touch.

"Are we friends?" he asks.

Gary looks up at him. He is tired.

"Uh-huh," he says.

 

*

 

There's a scuffle. Half a word falls out, hangs in the air, retracts. Gary hadn't realised how close he was to David until he turns and Scholesy's by the door, the colour of his eyes stood stark against the black.

"Scholesy," he says, but Scholesy is wheeling back into the pub, and David is standing up and putting his hands in his pockets.

"I should go."

Gary pulls himself upright, shoulders his way to the door, watches ginger and blonde exit. Phil's trying to catch his eye and he fixes him with a blind, blank stare.

Phil says sorry and Gary says you've nothing to be sorry about and David doesn't come the next day and there's that.

It's nothing, really.

 

*

 

David walks in again a hot day two weeks later. Gary pushes him a whiskey. He downs it and leaves.

 

*

 

It's nothing. Really.

 

*

 

"You should get some music in here," David says. It's the first time he's spoken and Gary's hand slips on the counter, obvious in its mistake.

"Can't afford a radio."

David grins. "I'll buy you one. One of those jukeboxes."

Reading into that would be another mistake, this one too obvious to attempt.

"Madchester only, yeah? None of that Beatles shite."

"Scout's honour."

"You were never a scout."

"Pretend I was."

That's all they've ever done. Gary hums a note without a tune and it settles into the empty air between them.

"So," David picks it up, dry. "This is how it feels to be lonely."

Gary offers a smile. It draws thin across his cheeks. "This is how it feels to be small."

 

*

 

They come round again, slowly, like a recovery process neither of them knew they had needed. Even then something's shifted, Gary thinks. The things they don't talk about are different now.

He doesn't see Scholesy around either. Everything feels cold, worn. Silence stretches like an old sock pulled to the point of tearing itself apart.

 

*

 

"How much do I have on my tab?" David asks. The season is sinking into heavy summer, and sweat slicks the back of Gary's neck.

It's no excuse for the glass he drops. The shards of glass wink beatific up at him, a reminder of things broken.

"Three million quid," he replies. Doesn't give David the gratification of meeting his gaze. Both of them know what's going on here, and both of them are too stubborn to do what ought to be done.

David exhales slowly, the kind of slow that sinks with ships. "Can I owe you?"

"'Course."

Don't think, he tells himself. Don't think, just dance. Grab the broom and sweep up the glass. Pour the whiskey. Dance.

David drinks his whiskey.

"What part of Manchester you from?"

"Greater." Gary pulls a face. Don't think. "Bury."

"Why United, then?"

The glass tinkles as Gary sweeps them together.

"Why not?"

Silence stretches further. Surely there must be someone else in the pub, but if there is, they aren't saying anything.

Gary wonders if he ought to make some kind of a grand statement - don't go, we need you, I need you - but he busies himself with pouring the shards into the bin below the counter. There's something almost hilarious in being friends (whatever) with superstars, finding out where they're going without needing to ask.

"I've never been to Spain," he says.

David leaves his whiskey in the middle of the water ring. Exactly in the middle. Gary begins to hate how symmetrical it is.

 

*

 

In another universe, maybe they would have touched. Run fingers over each other's skin, feel the shiver of electricity and anticipation. There wouldn't even have to be anything sexual about it. Laugh lines, rough knees, the loose skin around the knuckles. The golden hairs that lined his jaw.

Maybe they could have spent their days in the pub, after David's retirement. David could buy the jukebox. They'd serve drinks and people might whisper about getting a pint from the front page of a GQ magazine. David could even grow a moustache; it'd be fucking hilarious.

In another universe, maybe neither of them would say _I love you_ to each other because. You know. Neither of them would need to.

 

*

 

Gary finds the drawer under the counter years after. He'd stopped buying magazines when David left, for no particular reason. They're all faded and crumpled and some of them have had their pages crinkled by water. David grins up at him in a United shirt, still red after all.

He leaves them out for Scholesy, scribbles _TO THROW_ on a post-it and sticks it on top of the pile. The next day they are gone.

 

*

 

Once, Gary thinks he sees something.

It's a midweek game. Gary got stuck with bar duty while Scholesy and Phil buggered off, so he's got one hand on the counter and his eyes are fixed on the telly. Solskjaer is long gone but the baby face of Rashford lights up the stadium instead.

At eighty five minutes United have secured a two-nil lead and the post-match throng begins to stream in, but it's a rare enough event that Gary keeps watching, leaving Ryan to grab the newcomers. Only when the final whistle blows does he look back around. Everyone's gotten their beers and the like.

The bottle of Haig Club whiskey on the shelf is cracked open.

His throat constricts. He floats, falls, doesn't think, dances.

A man tucked away in the corner of the pub looks over and catches his eye. His hair is the colour of sunshine, and he smiles as he raises his glass, sets it down amidst the water ring, before the bustle of the crowd hides him from view again.

Gary looks at his hands. The bare patch on the counter has begun to fade some, seeping into the chipped grain. He wraps the cloth around his bloodbitten fingers and begins to scrub.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Didn't think an AU could have my usual extensive footnotes? *cracks knuckles*  
> Think again! 
> 
> \- Timeline: around 2002/03  
> \- Choose any Madchester playlist, and that's your soundtrack  
> \- Canal Street is the main road in the Manchester Gay Village  
> \- Arndale is the main Manchester shopping centre; I did genuinely try to find out what cafes were open in 2003 but I gave up bothering  
> \- All interview quotes are from [here](https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.gq.com/story/david-beckham-cover-protecting-kids-brooklyn&sa=D&ust=1498515854542000&usg=AFQjCNHDRa0BjiSR5QM5DDN40hNivMlV2A)  
> \- Becks made his full debut in the 2-1 League Cup win over Port Vale in 1994 (he'd previously subbed for Kanchelskis against Brighton in 1992) - coincidentally, the same game Scholesy made his full debut  
> \- [That Goal](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4tVnpwp8d4)  
> \- Boundary Park (that Butty and Scholesy used to play for) were local rivals-ish of Gary's boyhood Bury Juniors  
> \- We actually beat Charlton one day after Becks's birthday and needed Arsenal to lose to Leeds the next day before we won the title, but let's pretend  
> \- Becks's favourite movie is actually [Ratatouille](http://rmcsport.bfmtv.com/football/pink-boots-cartoons-zidane-and-ratatouille-beckham-reveals-his-secrets-349149.html)  
> \- More on the Phil/Scholesy shenanigans [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11099634)  
> \- The song they sing is Inspiral Carpets' This Is How It Feels To Be Small  
> \- Title from The Charlatans  
> \- I kinda imagine the pub name is Sally Cinnamon  
> \- I wasn't sure at all of this piece because it's a completely different side of Gaz that I usually go for (insecure self-loathing rather than high-strung scouse humping) even though it does exist - let me know what you think!  
> \- Thanks for reading <3


End file.
